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RED HORSE keeps planes landing at Kandahar

  • Published
  • By Maj. David Kurle
  • 455 AEW public affairs
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan --  Runways are essential to any air operation and a lot of the airfields in Afghanistan, used in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, need improvements.

Here, the runway is being refurbished by cutting it in half length-wise, with crews repairing one side while aircraft land and take off on the other. With the first half complete, construction crews are working on the next stage.

In order to keep using the now completed side of the runway, lighting was required to keep the airfield open for aircraft landing at night and that job fell to the 1st Expeditionary RED HORSE Group.

Master Sgt. Richard Brown, a RED HORSE infrastructure supervisor, leads a team of six Airmen deployed to Bagram Airfield who traveled to Kandahar in Southwest Afghanistan to install an emergency airfield lighting system (EALS) to keep the planes landing

“(The EALS) is specifically made for contingency engineering, to put down so we have an MOS, minimum operating standards for airfield operations,” he said.

Normally a typical installation requires one to two days, but because the team needed to bolt the lights to a concrete runway to prevent them from being knocked over by the British Harrier aircraft that operate from here, the job took just over one week.

“Airfield concrete is harder concrete than normal, so drilling the holes is a lot tougher than regular concrete,” Sergeant Brown said.

The team also needed to overcome parts shortages and a lack of materials that comes with operating in remote locations like Kandahar.

“Simple stuff like a screw can hold up an entire project,” he said. The team overcame a problem with a lack of hardware by switching to different kinds of screws, which were “scrounged” from around the base by Airmen deployed here to the 451st Expeditionary Civil Engineer Flight.

“We get the job done with the limited resources we have,” said Capt. Matt Altman, 451st ECEF commander.

The assistance from the REDHORSE team was crucial for air operations to continue here during the ongoing runway construction, according to Captain Altman.

“We’re constantly doing runway repairs and without RED HORSE doing the lighting system, we couldn’t have done the runway swap,” he said.